Capitalism is a bundle of things that tend to come together historically: free markets with enforced contracts, lending at interest, exponential technological/economic growth, and investor ownership of the means of production.

I don’t think capitalism is inherently good or bad, it’s just a pretty simple attractor state for societies which has good and bad parts. But I’ve been thinking about how automation changes things.

Democracy is fundamentally about distributed power. When human labor is essential everywhere, workers have power (they can strike, etc).

With full automation, workers have nothing to offer that capitalists need. People could theoretically go live off the land and get by, but they’d be powerless. The automated economy would dwarf anything they could produce, and the capitalists could walk all over them whenever they wanted.

So it seems like you can pick two of {automation, capitalism, democracy}, but not all three. If we want to keep democracy as we automate, investor ownership of production probably has to go.

Questions like ‘what if everyone is an investor’ etc follow and are interesting but I haven’t gotten to them quite yet. Also, this models automated human labor replacement as controllable by owners which is unlikely to be the case in practice.